Word: sci-fi
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...draw similarities between the actor and John Anderton, his complex, haunted character in Minority Report, is irresistible. In Spielberg's sci-fi mystery, Cruise stars as a seemingly stalwart cop in 2054 who heads an elite squad known as Precrime. Using a trio of psychic mutants called precogs, he can detect a murder before it happens, strap on a jet pack, then arrest the would-be perpetrator. But Anderton leads a double life, scoring a drug called neuroin in dark alleys, seeking oblivion after the unraveling of his family. Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick...
Verne and Vonnegut, Borges and Burgess, Lessing and LeGuin--they all wrote science fiction that was taken seriously during their lives. Philip K. Dick's work, no less serious or searching, was confined to the ghetto of SF (that's the short form, folks--never, ever sci-fi). He stalked through earthly life, through five wives, a drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, seeing his SF novels published in tatty Ace paperbacks, his other fiction regularly rejected. When he died, in 1982, at 53, mainstream readers didn't know Phil Dick...
When skeptical listeners scoff at Kurzweil's sci-fi predictions, saying, "Oh, we won't see that for 100 years," he points out that when it comes to "innovation time," 100 years melts down to about 25. That's because, as he says, "our rate of exponential growth is growing exponentially." Evolution accelerates: it took 100 million years for the human brain to develop, but computing power is expected to surpass it within a generation. "By 2040 or 2050 nonbiological intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence," he says...
...opened with a clip of him singing “I’m a toll-man” to the tune of the Blues Brothers’ “Soul Man,” focused on a Back To the Future theme, using clips from the 1985 sci-fi thriller to “travel” through the course of his life, from his early days as a child in Brighton housing projects to his career in the state senate...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A Room with a Mind of Its Own Machines with sinister minds of their own have been standard fare in popular sci-fi chillers like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stephen King's bestseller Christine. But the fiction behind these devices is rapidly becoming fact, and Ada - a room-sized artificial intelligence system on show at the 2002 Swiss National Exhibition in Neuch?tel until Oct. 20 - is living proof. Developed at the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Ada is a mirror-clad room outfitted with its own electronic eyes and ears...